Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

A brilliant investigation of globalization, the most significant socioeconomic trend in the world today, and how it is affecting everything we do - economically, politically, and culturally - abroad and at home. As foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman crisscrosses the globe talking with the world's economic and political leaders. Now he has used his years of experience as a reporter and columnist to produce a pithy, trenchant, riveting look at the worldwide market forces that are driving today's economies.

The World Is Flat: Further Updated and Expanded

With the "flattening" of the globe, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner? Now in a third edition with a new preface, Friedman's account of the flattening of the earth is a modern classic.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America

Friedman brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy - both of which could poison our world if we do not act quickly and collectively. His argument speaks to all of us who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

Becoming a Resonant Leader

A powerful case has been made for emotional intelligence and its role in leadership. As Annie McKee and Richard Boyatzis showed in their best selling books, Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership, the best leaders use their emotional intelligence to create resonance with others.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

isaiah says:"The book is a great review of how we got to where we are today"

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism

Hyperpartisanship has gridlocked the American government. Congress' approval ratings are at record lows, and both Democrats and Republicans are disgusted by the government's inability to get anything done. In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, Congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein present a grim picture of how party polarization and tribal politics have led Congress - and the United States - to the brink of institutional failure.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch - the endless fascination human beings have with design rather than evolution, with direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley's wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high.

When Carol Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge-fund manager in a 1966 Fortune article, she didn’t dream that Warren Buffett would one day be considered the world’s greatest investor - nor that she and Buffett would become close personal friends. Now Loomis has collected and updated the best Buffett articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2012, including thirteen cover stories and a dozen pieces authored by Buffett himself. Loomis has provided commentary about each major arti­cle that supplies context and her own informed point of view.

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators.

The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, Revised and Updated

This revised and updated edition of the best-selling book A Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few ways to handle the most important and difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. Using myriad illustrative examples and filled with how-to techniques, this book clearly explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time.

Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance: A Jack Ryan Novel, Book 17

It begins with a family dinner in Princeton, New Jersey. After months at sea, US Navy commander Scott Hagan, captain of the USS James Greer, is on leave when he is attacked by an armed man in a crowded restaurant. Hagan is shot, but he manages to fight off the attacker. Though severely wounded, the gunman reveals he is a Russian whose brother was killed when his submarine was destroyed by Commander Hagan's ship. Hagan demands to know how the would-be assassin knew his exact location, but the man dies before he says more.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoing manner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, Professor Hamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories.

The Post-American World 2.0

Here is the New York Times and international best seller, revised and expanded with a new afterword. This is the essential update of Fareed Zakaria's analysis about America and its shifting position in world affairs. In this new edition, Zakaria makes sense of the rapidly changing global landscape. With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, he draws on lessons from the two great power shifts of the past 500 years - the rise of the Western world and the rise of the United States - to tell us what we can expect from the third shift, the rise of the rest.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again

Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as the current economic malaise in Europe, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending. Though the banking crisis captured the public's attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors.

Publisher's Summary

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.

They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the nation to the need to address these issues. They show how our history, when properly understood, provides the key to addressing them, and explain how the paralysis of our political system and the erosion of key American values have made it impossible for us to carry out the policies the country needs. They offer a way out of the trap into which the country has fallen, which includes the rediscovery of some of our most valuable traditions and the creation of a new, third-party movement.

That Used to Be Us is both a searching exploration of the American condition today and a rousing manifesto for American renewal. "As we were writing this book," Friedman and Mandelbaum explain, "we found that when we shared the title with people, they would often nod ruefully and ask: 'But does it have a happy ending?' Our answer is that we can write a happy ending, but it is up to the country - to all of us - to determine whether it is fiction or nonfiction. We need to study harder, save more, spend less, invest wisely, and get back to the formula that made us successful as a country in every previous historical turn. What we need is not novel or foreign, but values, priorities, and practices embedded in our history and culture, applied time and again to propel us forward as a country. That is all part of our past. That used to be us and can be again - if we will it."

Thomas Friedman & Michael Mandlebaum raise familiar issues and if you read Friedman's "The World is Flat" you will follow this theme. When Friedman wrote that book in 2005 there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no 3D printers and few smart-phones. These and many more changes have become a part of our environment in the past six years. The authors repeatedly ask what is the United States doing to ensure its' citizens have enough education and resources to compete in the new global environment? What happens to our workforce as routine work is shifted to anyplace on the globe or to a machine? In 1970 my first employer, New York Telephone, employed 106,000 people just for New York State and today Verizon has 194,400 for over half the country. NYT once employed 32,000 phone operators all of which are gone with some having been replaced by a machine.

I started listening to Friedman's 16-hour audio book but soon realized it required a hard copy to reference. A lot of information some of which is intense. The authors attempt to put a positive spin on the problems that are accumulating in the US but one reviewer noted that simply describing the problems makes solutions seem overwhelming. This book is an excellent compendium of the major challenges that must be resolved. At the heart of their thesis is information technology and the internet have changed everything and the US is slipping behind that curve at an accelerating rate.

For example: On Sunday our washing machine broke. On Monday I called the company who serviced it five years ago. On Tuesday a repairman arrived. If the machine was unrepairable they would give me a $50 credit for a new machine which they would deliver, install and remove the old machine. I asked if they are still in Teaneck, NJ so I could see what they sold. "Henry" told me they closed all their retail stores four years ago and everything is now done on the internet. They would email me links to recommended machines and I could choose one that would be delivered by a third party. I asked if he was in India and he said no, but how can I know? The repairman arrived, diagnosed a defective water pump, took a picture of the plate with serial and model numbers on an iPhone, emailed it back to dispatch and told me it would cost about $300 to repair. The replacement water pump was manufactured in China.

In essence I am dealing with a virtual company and I learned that the repairmen are all contract employes who are dispatched like taxicabs and obtain parts from a central depot. This is the new business model and an significant percentage of our adult population is or will be unemployed as a result.

Note I ordered Friedman's book book from a Seattle company on Saturday and it was delivered with free-shipping for $15.23 on Tuesday afternoon originating in a warehouse somewhere over the rainbow. The audio version was downloaded from Audible and arrived three minutes after placing the order. If you are in the CD &/or Book business (like Borders, Sam's, Circuit City and Tower Records) you are history along with the careers of many otherwise good people.

Our national goals must have much much more majesty than elimination of government and lower taxes. If our national objective is only inwardly focused reductions then our children and grandchildren are guaranteed to drive on roads with potholes, slow trains that run off schedule, intermittent power, diseases brought about by unprocessed sewage from broken filtration plants, increased social unrest, high energy prices, bosses with foreign accents, more Homeland Security initiatives and no meaningful future such as the one many of us found back in the early 1960s when we entered the workforce.

We don't have to agree with evertthing Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum yet like the classic World is Flat this should spark conversations. I'm a proud parent of a 6th grade school teacher and and wish parents would read this. Todays Manhattan Project should be fixing our educational and vocational training. This book gives practical solutions in the changing world and hopefully American which ends I can WILL before flat world 3.0 is here and apathy stays the course for our next generation.

Do not read this book unless you have never read a column by Friedman. Once again, he pastes together dozens of columns and stories that he has published repeatedly and calls it a book. The greatest disappointment was his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum, a distinguished and accomplished professor of international relations. My hope was that Professor Mandelbaum would put historical and trenchant prespectives into Friedman's endless anecdotes. Unfortunately, Mandelbaum seems to have bought entirely into the Friedman style and is no where to be seen intellectually in this book. I have read probably several hundred of Friedman's columns and his earlier books. What a profound disappointment this one was.

I listened to his ???The World Is Flat??? and ???Hot, Flat & Crowded??? and they were great. This one was just as long but did not seem to have anything new to say, although it was sprinkled with some interesting tidbits. Also, not sure how much I believe in their solutions to solve these issues.

After reading Friedman's "The world is Flat", one of the best books I've had the pleasure to read, I was looking forward to this one. Apparently Friedman's co-author, Mandelbaum, in "That Used to Be Us" was convinced that his myopic view from the political left was reality. Mandelbaum would make a good counter balance to Rush Limbaugh.

Has That Used to Be Us turned you off from other books in this genre?

It has for any book that has Michael Mandelbaum as an author, or co author

If you could sum up That Used to Be Us in three words, what would they be?

There are some subjects in this book which are a "wake up call."

What about Jason Culp’s performance did you like?

Well read.

Any additional comments?

Having read both what others consider conservative and liberal books, I think that thesegentlemen have stumbled on certain truths that all Americans should take a closer look as gobalization becomes a greater part of our lives. As with any book, this book should be read in context and compared with the reader's experience with other books. Our founding fathers taught us to at least be open to other's ideas. This is a good read especially when read before or after reading Thomas Sowell books. Another interesting comparision is Mark Steyn books

Friedman & Mandelbaum do what their title says they will do. They discuss all the ways America has become self-delusional in it's own success and as a result not seen the error its ways to maintain itself as a superpower. We've begun to falter and now it's too late to turn this boat string of bad decisions around without making serious sacrifices..is the argument being made here.

I like how this book isn't democrat or republican it's truth and real solutions. It's thoughtful and not political. Perfect for the independent thinker who likes hearing truth and good ideas from whoever they originate. This book covers so much that even Tiger Mom got mentioned. There's so much discussed that I had to take a break with part 1. I'll come back to part 2 I suppose when I get frustrated with politics once again and ...again start looking for answers outside of that world.

Another problem with this audiobook presenting so much information, you sometimes want to stop and further research statements or references made. So it takes you even longer to get through and you wish you really had the physical book so that you could do some actual bookmarking. As a visual, hands-on person sometimes I wish I had the REAL book to go along with my audiobook.

But anyway, politics, the global economy, education, china/BRIC, the "good ole days" in America, should we become more like China?, America's ability to compete in the global economy, what type of jobs will we see in the future, which will become obsolete? So many many interesting topics discussed here. If done as a lecture series or discussion group this would easily be an entire semester's worth of material and you would still have a million assignments to do at home.

The authors did not provide a single original thought. Their credentials are insufficient to write a book like this. They simply replicate facts (some hard, some soft) from more prominent, smarter people. While I agree with a lot of what the duo had to say, I have read all the books that are cited and not cited by the two. Skip this book; read Gladwell, Taleb and Carnegie.

The anthers painstakingly describe what has gotten America into its current economic and political problems and what is needed to get America back on track. As an American this is the most discouraging book I have listened to.